


Hang Me Up, Unfinished

by TatlBJifik



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Gore, Death, Death of a Parent, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Gore, Grief/Mourning, James Joyce bashing, Journal, Nightmares, Not Really lol, Some of this shit is just real gross and fucked up, Trigger warnings prolly like woah, Vent Writing, im sorry, slices of life, venting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 19:24:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13665687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TatlBJifik/pseuds/TatlBJifik
Summary: a vent journal for my grieving process





	1. Letters to you, part 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's just a constant headache, a tooth out of line  
> They try to make you regret it  
> You tell 'em, "No, not this time."  
> It's just a constant headache, a dead pet device  
> You hang me up unfinished  
> With the better part of me no longer mine
> 
> \--Constant Headache, Joyce Manor
> 
>  
> 
> This whole work is my journal essentially, where little non-fiction drabbles go. There is vent writing in here. I'll add tags for triggers as I go. A lot of this is about my dad. This is me, dealing with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A letter to my dad

I miss you so much it physically aches. Everyone says that, and I've experienced it before. But I've never been so scared of my own emotions as I am with the ones thinking of you dredges up. It's this horrible dark, deep, enormous crack in the earth. I don't know where or what's at the bottom of it and I feel like I spend my days teetering right at the edge of it.

Sometimes I forget that I can't call you anymore. Sometimes I forget about you completely and I still don't know what to do with that. But then it comes in these pangs, these punches to the gut. I feel nauseated and unsettled. I wanna crawl out of my skin to get away from this grief. It feels like it's eating me. Or poisoning me.

I hate it. I hate thinking about it. I hate that you're gone. It's stupid, it's so fucking stupid that you aren't here where I can talk to you and hug you and laugh at every joke you made or get mad at you for being old and sometimes racist. I can't gripe at you to take care of yourself. I can't ever know what you'll look like holding your first grandchild or what stupid button up shirt you'd wear to my college graduation, or how many hours late you'll be to my wedding.

I hate it. I hate that I push my mourning so far away that sometimes I feel like you weren't even real. I hate when I'm sad about you and I hate when I'm not sad about you. I hate how little I've cried about it and I hate ever crying about it. I hate that your funeral was at some podunk cowboy church that you would have made fun of and I hate that I didn't call you enough. I hate that I didn't save all your voicemails and I hate that I can't remember the last conversation that we had. I know how it ended though, because all of our phone conversations ended the same way. "I guess I'll let you go. Love you, I'll talk to you a little later."

I wish I had wrote down all of your recipes and favorite movies and songs. I wish I had come over and helped with the house and the fence that you were gonna put up and the garden you were going to plant and that stupid fucking tiki bar idea you had. I wish we had got to finish all the Hobbit movies without you falling asleep. I wish I had got to tell you that I finally found my class ring again. It was in the dryer hose for some reason. We were disconnecting the dryer when we moved from the student apartments, the ones we made that awful 10 lb lasagna in, the one where Susan called me. Anyway, we were disconnecting the hose and it fell right out. Situation normal.

I hate every new house I live in and every new person I meet and every new hair color I try because they move me further away from where you were. And someday I'll have lived more years without you than with you and I'll forget your voice and your smiles and your laughs and the color of your eyes. If I have kids one day, I don't even know if you would have wanted to be called grandpa or papa or something else, I'll tell them all about you and they'll laugh at your jokes and your stories and think of you as this fond, distant memory, just like I thought of your mom when you told me about her. But they'll never understand, like I never understood, how much light and love you brought to everyone around you. They'll never understand how unlucky they are to have never met you and how much of me is because of you.


	2. James Joyce is kind of a tool

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly I don't have a personal vendetta against James Joyce but my lit professor just nuts over him and it irritates me

He was the type of chain-smoking, day-drinking 20th century writer you find in a hotel bar with a nautical motif. He'll be accompanied by a girl who's not his wife. She'll be much younger than him and she'll laugh after everything he says. He'll write about her later, calling her vapid and dull, though he'll refuse to leave her company all night. When he describes her appearance, he'll wax poetic about her body but he'll use words like figure and form rather than organic terms. Her beauty will be described in some significant religious metaphor, but he'll never actually talk about her face, or give her a name.

"The air carries that bitter sting of winter," James Joyce says, gazing melancholically into the distance. "The kind of liquid cold that seeps into the mind and the heart all season. It drips from your nose and coats your fingers and pours into your bones until you're filled up with it. It seeps in under doorways and jackets, it gusts up in drafts on the floor, feet and heart pale purple blue and frostbitten. The dull grey white of the sky feels vast and compressed at once, and you can't make up your mind on whether you would fall into it or it's pressing down on you. Every living thing browns around your peripheral all autumn until winter finally arrives, leaving not one shred of color in its wake. Warmth is crucified on the icy cross of December."

"It's only like 38 degrees, James Joyce." I say, handing him my scarf. "If you're that fucking cold, layer up before you go out next time."


	3. Dreams of you, part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A nightmare I had about my dad. I have a lot of them. There will be many of these.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check the tags, there is always rotting or decaying folks in my dreams yall

I had a dream that I watched you sit down on a bench. The bench was in one of those tunnels under bridges in parks that you see on TV in big cities. No one was around even though it was midday and warm but overcast and the wind was slow and sporadic. It was perfect picnic weather. 

You were looking at me with this blank and mildly smiling expression that looked like it belonged on a porcelain doll. It was entirely unsettling. I was standing and fixed in one spot, view panning around like a video camera. 

Slowly you began to lay down on the bench. As you leaned down your skin started rotting, blackening and peeling away in layers. In the dream I didn't feel anything from seeing this. I only remember thinking about how dry the process was. I thought there should be blood and viscera dripping from your necrotic flesh. I found it odd that nothing slid and poured through the slats of the wooden bench to splash on the pavement beneath. It was like you had already bled out a long time ago, on some strange and clinical way that I couldn't understand. 

Your body kept wasting away in front of me until you lay fully on the bench. Suddenly your face was the same as it was at the beginning, skin intact, glassy eyed and vacantly smiling. Then as I watched it charred, burned and turned to ash. The wind blew through the tunnel and the ashes scattered into the air. 

Finally I felt some emotion- panic. The thought of breathing in the ash horrified me and I tried to run but I didn't want to leave your body there. I tried to get closer to you while holding my breath but the rest of you burned and charred too, and everything went dark.


End file.
